Land Tenure and Agriculture. J J 



vation, or deny the rights of common pasturage after harvest. 

 Very possibly these instances of divided rights point to some 

 remote past, when a class struggle occurred betwixt the seig- 

 norial and popular interests, ending in a compromise whereby 

 neither side wholly ceded or wholly retained its original posi- 

 tion. On the other hand, it is equally possible, as we shall 

 now hope to show, that no such contest took place. 



The lord's demesne, there is little doubt, originally consti- 

 tuted that portion of the Folcland arbitrarily, or otherwise, 

 appropriated to private uses during the days of allodial tenure, 

 or even earher. But if the supreme authorities possessed only 

 the crudest notions of political economy, they would have fore- 

 seen that every additional acre brought under cultivation 

 tended to enhance the wealth of their dominions. It is there- 

 fore natural to infer that the utmost inducement would be held 

 out to landed capitalists to extend their legitimate boundaries 

 at the expense of the people's waste. It is the old story of the 

 Ager Publicus over again. There are the wealthy squatters, 

 the tenure of the occupatio, and the gradual absorption of the 

 community's territory. But there was no code of agrarian 

 laws, and no Gracchi to interfere between class and class. 



But this is a theory which at first sight seems to lay the axe 

 to the root of all manorial rights, from the days when private 

 estates in land were small, and the people's waste enormous, to 

 the present age, when the latter has dwindled down to rustic 

 cricket fields and gorse-sown village greens. It, however, doss 

 not necessarily do anything of the kind. In all these theo- 

 retical questions regarding origin it is essential that the student 

 should keep ever before him a picture of the situation at its 

 very beginning. The most noticeable feature of the country 

 throughout the Anglo-Saxon period was its vast areas of forest 

 land, interspersed with which were marshes, moors, and scrub. 

 Infinitesimally minute in comparison were the rare patches of 

 cultivated ground ^ about the village. A few, probably a very 



^ The sparsity of the population can scarcely be exaggerated. At tlie 

 very end of the Anglo-Saxon era, we find the census of a great county 

 like Yorkshire consisting of only 9,968 souls. Surrey contained 4,547, 

 Middlesex, 2,289. The eastern parts of the island were, however, more 



